Posted by Matt Kendrick on Tuesday, 8 December, 2009
Flash is not one of my strongest suites in web development. At this time, I would say my skills are very limited. You could say I’m more of a backend kind of coder. But from time to time I dabble in front-end affairs. I thought I would start learning more about Flash. So I read through some tutorials. Got a little confused. Became little frustrated, because there isn’t a ‘Hello World’ type tutorial for Flash. But now I think I understand things a little bit more. For my first project I wanted to try building a whiteboard.
www.webwasp.co.uk has some nice click by click tutorials for learning flash. I found one aimed at building a whiteboard. After a few minutes, I had a working product. I expanded a little bit more on the tutorial. I added a control bar at the bottom and restricted the drawing function from being able to draw in that area. Then I added a link to my website from control bar. You can see how this all turned out below.
Lately, I’ve been at much debate about some of my software development practices. Today, there are so many readily available content management systems, scripts and widgets. I’ve always been one to develop sites/applications completely on my own. Why reinvent the wheel? Why not just use something already in place. After much pondering, I’ve reminded myself that not every situation calls for something to work out of the box.
The real challenge is to take whats out there and make it work. But the greater challenge is to do so without hacking it up in the process. There has to be a happy medium between pre-built scripts and in house development. I think harmony can be found. But in whatever case, keep your time line in check. I’m going to leave this post open ended. Anyone with an idea on how to find that happy medium or has any other thoughts. Please comment!
Recently I’ve started using jQuery in my projects. I don’t understand how I lived without it. I’ll admit, JavaScript is one of my weaker development skill sets. My main issue is dealing with cross browser compatibility and the length of code needed to do basic tasks. Thanks to jQuery I don’t have to code as much and don’t have to watch cross browser compatibility as closely as I did before. Not to mention the cool animation effects you can do. AJAX is a breeze. What once took hundreds of lines of code take one or two lines. Plug-ins are also available. If jQuery doesn’t do something you want it to do, you may find a plugin that will. According to their website, a lot of bigger sites are using it. Some of them include Dell, Google, and Digg. The content management system your viewing this site uses some jQuery. If your looking for a way to simplify JavaScript, speed up development and write less code. Then jQuery your answer! Best part is its free!
For you web development guys. Let me show you a sample of jQuery.
Say for example you have a hidden div (with the id “my_hidden_message”) that you would like to display when a button (with the id “btn_my_button”) is pressed. Given that you have jQuery referenced (in your head tag), the code syntax would be as simple as:
<script language=’javascript’>
$(document).ready(function() {
$(“#btn_my_button”).click(function()
{
$(“#my_hidden_message”).show(“slow”);
});
)};
</script>
Note this must be in your <head></head> tag after jQuery is referenced.
That’s it! When the button is clicked your hidden message will slowly appear in. Leave out the word slow and it will pop right up. Even without the slow animation, the same code by traditional methods would be much longer and not as flexable. So there ya have it. That’s jQuery take it or leave it!
Recently I’ve started using
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